YouTube! Great, isn't it? You can watch cats falling down stairs and drugged children and sweets being dropped into soft drinks. Nowadays, you can even watch whole, more-than-five-minute TV shows.

But what if you actually want to watch a film? Unless you've got cable TV with movies on demand, you're still left getting up, going to the video store and renting a DVD. A DVD! What is this, 2002?

Now YouTube is going to fix evening-length entertainment for us, just as it fixed coffee-break-length entertainment. The Financial Times is reporting that Google, owners of YouTube (and almost everything else), are deep in talks with 'Hollywood's leading movie studios' about putting pay-per-view movie streaming rentals onto the site.

In a few months you might be able to watch, say, Harry Potter 7 whenever you want without getting up. Now it's just a case of getting your PC sending video to your TV. Fortunately there are more and more gadgets for doing that, and more soon to come, no doubt.